The flowering of European Jewry in the days before 1914 is a cultural phenomenon comparable to the ‘golden’ periods of national art in Spain, France and England, even to the great years of the Italian Renaissance. Like other such peaks of civilisation, it might have faded of its own accord had it not been brought to a tragic end by the xenophobia engendered by two world wars, by Nazism and Soviet Fascism. It was, above all, cosmopolitan. Not for nothing (a favourite phrase of Russian critics) did Mandelstam observe that Acmeism, the literary movement which he helped to found in 1910 in St Petersburg, took as the inspiration for its poetry the whole European cultural tradition.

The particular ideas and ideals to which Mandelstam was referring, though naturally associated with pan-European Jewish culture, are just as much a part of the best German and Russian art at this time. Rilke and Musil, Joyce and Jules Romains, were all in a sense honorary Jews, the natural fellows of Proust or Svevo. It was a family atmosphere, in which German and Russian, Italian and French, were for members the natural media of intelligence and imagination. Pushkin’s feeling for the family of art was as strong as Auden’s, and Pushkin was a forerunner of this latterday renaissance of cosmopolitanism, however inevitably he is also Russia’s great national poet. Even while the state xenophobia of Stalin was setting in, Pasternak made most of his living by translations of European poetry, from Shakespeare to Goethe and Petöfi.

And it is an insight into relations within such a family that comes to us from this correspondence of Pasternak with his cousin, Olga Freidenberg, almost like the understanding we get from the art of a very good novel. Both Pasternak and his cousin belonged to predominantly Jewish families and clans from Odessa, the most cosmopolitan of Russian towns. Both families were Russianised: the Pasternaks, who lived in Moscow where the poet’s father was an art curator and successful painter, especially so. Although this correspondence reveals how closely Pasternak was connected with family and cousinage, it does not indicate – or only by indirection – what decidedly equivocal feelings the poet had about his ancestry. As much as Blok had done, he identified in his life and work with Russianness and Russian history; and this Russianness, together with the tendency among admirers of his work – and even in the Party – to identify him with Ivan the Holy Fool of Russian folklore, was undoubtedly one of the factors that contributed to his remarkable immunity from the worst persecution. By background, temperament and culture he was as cosmopolitan a poet as Mandelstam, but Mandelstam was not only more obviously Jewish but belonged to those especially Europeanised circles of the Petersburg intelligentsia which came in for the most systematic persecution by Stalin and his henchmen. Pasternak, like his own Dr Zhivago, was emphatically a Moscow man, and in the course of the Twenties and Thirties the Party came to identify more and more with the old xenophobic Muscovite tradition.

Letters

SIR: I would like to know John Bayley’s evidence for claiming (LRB, 4 November) that Olga Pasternak’s Poetics of Plot and Genre reached many more readers than it would have done in a ‘free’ (Professor Bayley’s inverted commas) society as a result of having been banned. And do those inverted commas mean that he believes that we do not enjoy freedom of expression here in a way denied to the Soviet citizen? He goes on: ‘Few among us would read the Russian dissidents if they were not so well touted by the Western propaganda machine.’ More correct, surely, if he had said ‘none among us’, since dissident work is forbidden publication in its country of origin: if it were not published in the West, it would not be published at all. The sneer at the ‘colour-supplement press’ (pretty élitist) is incomprehensible in the context of describing how letters of Jamesian ‘discreet indirection’ have thereby been pressed into the service of ‘the usual mechanical interests of anti-Soviet mythology’. If he means that the letters were serialised, surely he doesn’t need the late Dr Leavis as sponsor for calling a Sunday newspaper a Sunday newspaper. If he doesn’t mean serialisation but some other form of publication, perhaps he would care to elucidate? Finally, there’s that ‘anti-Soviet mythology’ business. If he means (as surely he must) that books are somehow not banned in Russia, that the non-appearance of Dr Zhivago in the USSR was some kind of paradoxical publicity stunt, then it is he who is being perverse.

SIR: Elizabeth Roberts’s letter about the Pasternak-Freidenberg correspondence (Letters, 2 December 1982) puzzles me: I think we are at cross-purposes rather than in disagreement. Olga Freidenberg’s (not Olga Pasternak’s) Poetics of Plot and Genre did very well in the bookshops (‘sales began to mount,’ she writes) before it was withdrawn by the Soviet authorities. Hard to imagine a work with that title selling so well in the West? I apologise for the inverted commas in my phrase ‘free’ society. They were not intended ironically. We have perfect freedom to buy, and the publisher to publish, which is why a book like hers would only appear in limited numbers here.

Elizabeth Roberts also appears to query my point that books like the Pasternak-Freidenberg correspondence are serialised in the Sunday papers, not because of what is in them, but because anything of that kind has anti-Soviet publicity value. Well, I do not think some interesting letters between a French, English or American poet and his cousin would be likely to get serialised in this way. I have nothing against the Sunday paper, and I am very glad it did extracts from the correspondence. It would be even more gratifying if the paper serialised extracts from Poetics of Plot and Genre: then we might see why the Soviet censors banned Olga’s dissertation.